Housman Country

by Peter Parker

  Rather more unexpectedly, Housman’s poetry is at the centre of Alice Munro’s story ‘Wenlock Edge’ (2005), in which a young woman in Canada is persuaded to remove all her clothes in order to read aloud A Shropshire Lad to an older man, while in Kingsley Amis’s One Fat Englishman (1963), the protagonist attempts to ward off orgasm by repeatedly reciting to himself ‘The weeping Pleiads wester’. Allusions to Housman and his poetry in fiction more often turn up in a homosexual context, however. A distinct Shropshire Lad atmosphere pervades the journals of the cult English writer Denton Welch, in which he records bicycling around the Kentish countryside in the 1940s, watching lads stripping off to bathe in rivers and reflecting upon their likely fate in the war. The editor of these journals, Jocelyn Brooke, devoted most of his own writing to an attempt to capture a land of lost content, and both his semi-autobiographical novel, The Orchid Trilogy (1948–50), and the botanical volume The Flower in Season (1952, its title taken from ‘Ho, everyone that thirsteth’) are replete with references to Housman.

  Mary Renault’s pioneering homosexual novel The Charioteer (1953) also alludes to Housman in an appropriately covert way. Wounded at Dunkirk, Laurie Odell is torn between his love for a naval officer called Ralph and a conscientious objector called Andrew. Lying in bed during an air raid, he worries whether the two men are safe, while attempting to reassure a small boy in the next bed, who is recovering from a burst appendix. Laurie recalls (inaccurately) lines from ‘The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers’, which he feels he might have recited to the boy had he been a few years older – ‘But he looked a little fragile, yet, to shoulder the sky; and, besides, he had fallen asleep’. The source of these lines remains unidentified, but Renault was counting on her readers to recognise them – not least because, along with Plato’s Phaedrus (from which the novel derives its title), Housman’s poetry would be part of the supportive intellectual equipment a sensitive young homosexual such as Laurie would be likely to carry around with him.

  This is the kind of literature that the playwright Alan Bennett sought out as a shy, bookish, homosexual, working-class teenager in Leeds in the early 1950s: ‘I study as if they are code books the works of writers I have been told are homosexual, though of course they cannot at this time openly admit it. Most satisfactorily, though, there is A.E. Housman, whose affections are unspoken (or spoken of as unspoken), which is what mine always are, and who regards love as a doomed enterprise right from the start. Of his life and the object of his affections I know nothing, but as I roam the streets of Headingley in 1950 I feel he is the one I might tell it to, though what the “it” was I would have been hard put to say.’ This is a strikingly similar reaction to that of the young E.M. Forster some forty years before.

  Housman was one of the poets Bennett selected for a television series, Poetry in Motion, broadcast by Channel 4 in 1990. This was a ‘personal anthology’ of Six Poets: Hardy to Larkin (the title under which the accompanying book was republished in 2014), the other three being Betjeman, Auden and MacNeice. The poems Bennett chose were ‘all in differing degrees accessible’ and expressed a distinctive kind of Englishness, often manifesting itself in ‘that very English fault: an overdose of irony’. Irony is certainly characteristic of Bennett himself, whose 1968 play Forty Years On is a kind of cavalcade of Englishness, at once critical and affectionate, performed as a play at a public school called Albion House. Bennett described his play (which contains references to Housman) as ‘an elegy for the passing of a traditional England’, and admitted that his ‘heart was very much in [the headmaster’s] final speech in which he bids farewell to Albion House and this old England. And yet the world we lost wasn’t one in which I would have been happy, though I look back on it and read about it with affection.’ There is a distinct note of A Shropshire Lad in these remarks, which (Bennett notes) were written on the fiftieth anniversary of the Armistice.

  Housman’s dictum that ‘All knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use’ is quoted by a popular (and homosexual) teacher in Bennett’s later school play, The History Boys (2004), the principal theme of which is similar to that of Housman’s Introductory Lecture of 1892 about the purpose of learning and education. Housman himself steps onto the stage in Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love (1997), in which he is played by two different actors, one representing him as an old man, the other as an Oxford undergraduate. This provides the same double perspective that gives A Shropshire Lad much of its emotional power, youthful hope in dialogue with rueful maturity – literally so in the play, in which the two Housmans have extended conversations with each other about poetry, love and the Classics.

  But perhaps the perfect example of the way in which Housman’s poetry has been absorbed and refracted by a writer of a later generation is J.L. Carr’s novel A Month in the Country (1980). Housman’s were the poems Carr ‘loved best’, the poems he took with him to the Second World War. He subsequently became headmaster of Highfields Primary School in Kettering, Northamptonshire, and every year he would march all 200 of his pupils through a local housing estate when spring blossom was on the trees, leading them in a mass recitation of ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’, a poem some of them still had by heart forty years later. A Month in the Country is amongst other things a beautifully wrought study of England and Englishness. Although set in the North Riding of Yorkshire, it was written at least in part in Housman Country: the words ‘Stocken, Presteigne / September, 1978’ are printed on its last page, referring to the place in the Welsh Marches where Carr had lived in a caravan while working on one of the series of illustrated county maps he published. The novel is narrated by Tom Birkin, who in old age recalls the summer of 1920, when, as a shell-shocked young veteran of the First World War who has been deserted by his wife, he spends several recuperative weeks uncovering a medieval wall painting in an isolated church.

  The novel suggests Housman in its brevity, its lyricism, and its mood of nostalgia and regret. The second stanza of ‘From far, from eve and morning’ (XXXII) is used as one of its epigraphs, and is more or less paraphrased in the crucial central scene in which Birkin fails to make his feelings known to the young wife of the local vicar, with whom he has fallen in love. ‘That was the missed moment. I should have put out a hand and taken her arm and said “Here I am. Ask me. Now. The real question! Tell me. While I’m here. Ask me before it is too late.”’ Both Housman and Elgar, and their place in the English landscape of the Clee Hills and the Malverns, are imagined at the novel’s close, and the final paragraph carries a similar charge to that of A Shropshire Lad: ‘We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours for ever – the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.’

  It is not just in literary fiction that Housman’s presence is felt. As early as 1930 a knowledge of Housman’s poetry helps Lord Peter Wimsey solve the murder case at the centre of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Strong Poison (1930). The particular poem (‘Terence, this is stupid stuff’) is not mentioned by name, presumably because Sayers imagined her readers to be as literate as Wimsey’s butler, for whom the mere presence of A Shropshire Lad in his employer’s library is clue enough.

  A more recent fictional detective who knows his Housman is Inspector Morse, who first appeared in Colin Dexter’s Last Bus to Woodstock in 1975 and solved cases in twelve further novels over the following twenty-four years. Although these books were best-sellers, it was when The Dead of Jericho (1981) was adapted for television in 1987, inaugurating a series of thirty-three two-hour episodes broadcast over thirteen years, that Morse became arguably the most popular fictional English detective of all time. Morse’s love of Wagner is a constant feature of both the books and the television series, but his love of Housman is equally marked. Dexter suggests an equivalence for Morse between the two men in The Wench Is Dead (1989), at the beginning of wh
ich the detective experiences a spell in hospital in the same ward as a character who dies. ‘Had Morse known how the man could never abide a chord of Wagner, he would have felt much aggrieved,’ Dexter writes; ‘yet had he known how the Colonel had committed to memory virtually the whole of Housman’s poetic corpus, he would have been profoundly gratified.’ The Life of Richard Wagner and Selected Prose of A.E. Housman are among the ‘small pile of books’ on Morse’s bedside table in the second of the novels, Last Seen Wearing (1976), the latter informing the inspector about the dilemma he finds himself in during his investigation into the disappearance of a schoolgirl. Housman is referred to in several of the other novels, most notably in The Remorseful Day (1999), which takes its title from ‘How clear, how lovely bright’. Although the novel contains several mentions of Housman, the title is intended to suggest the dying Morse’s feelings about past mistakes, omissions, deceptions and things badly done, and it evokes the general mood of the book rather than anything more specific. In the television adaptation by Stephen Churchett, however, Morse recites the last verse of Housman’s poem as he watches a spectacular sunset.

  Dexter, who bought a copy of the first edition of Housman’s Collected Poems while reading Classics at Cambridge in 1950 and claims since then to have ‘collected everything written by Housman and about Housman’, sometimes relies upon his readers having an equal knowledge of the poet and his work. In Death Is Now My Neighbour (1996), for instance, Morse recalls that he had kept the photograph of a young woman he had loved and lost ‘pressed between pages 88–89 of his Collected Poems of A.E. Housman’. The reader needs to know which edition of the book Morse owns, because in the standard edition available in 1996 the ‘Epithalamium’ Housman wrote for Moses Jackson appears on those pages, but in the first edition (the one Morse is more likely to own) it would be ‘The True Lover’. Even more obscure are the lines ‘Dry the azured skylit water / Sky my everlasting tent’, which appear in a poem received by the police purporting to provide information about the location of a body in The Way Through the Woods (1992). The poem is attributed to ‘A. Austin (1853–87)’, which as the novel’s more literary readers will recognise from the dates cannot be the man who was Poet Laureate when A Shropshire Lad was published. They might also, if they really know their Housman, recognise that the poem has not merely appropriated two lines from ‘In my own shire, if I was sad’ (XLI) – ‘And like a skylit water stood / The bluebells in the azured wood’ – but has additionally cannibalised the cancelled quatrain from ‘He looked at me with eyes I thought’. This is not merely a rarefied literary in-joke; it also provides a clue to the identity of the person who wrote the mysterious poem.

  After the Inspector Morse television series came to an end, the detective’s sidekick Sergeant Lewis returned with his own series, and both Lewis and Endeavour (a ‘prequel’ set in the 1960s when Morse was embarking on his career in the police force) have continued to honour Housman. While Lewis still struggles with cultural references, his new sergeant, James Hathaway, is almost as well read as Morse was. In Dead of Winter (2010), a childhood friend who is being obliged to marry someone she doesn’t love in order to save her family’s finances is discovered looking up ‘Into my heart an air that kills’, a poem that Hathaway naturally knows by heart. The same poem is read when the ashes of a murder victim are scattered in a non-religious ceremony in Down Among the Fearful (2003), while the pilot episode of Endeavour (2012) involves an investigation into the death of a fifteen-year-old girl, during which the fact that she has a volume of Housman’s poems among other first editions on her bedside table provides a clue.

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  The presence of Housman in these globally successful television series shows how far the poet has penetrated popular culture. Another sure sign that one has become part of the mainstream is to feature in The Simpsons, a cartoon series distinguished by its knowing references to both high and low culture. In an episode from 1998 titled ‘The Last Temptation of Krust’ (itself a nod to a Martin Scorsese film), Bart persuades his favourite comedian, Krusty the Clown, to appear at a comedy festival. Krusty’s dated and offensive material is so fiercely criticised that the clown announces his retirement and quotes ‘To an Athlete Dying Young’ in his farewell speech. Housman’s poetry is also read or recited in such mainstream Hollywood films as Titanic (1953) and Out of Africa (1985), while John Irvine’s film adaptation of Frederick Forsyth’s The Dogs of War (1980), in which a group of soldiers are hired to stage a coup in a West African country, has Geoffrey Burgon’s setting of ‘Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries’ sung over its end titles. Housman even features in The Twilight Zone, which originally ran on American television between 1959 and 1964, in a much-loved episode titled ‘The Changing of the Guard’ (1962). A disillusioned teacher at a boys’ high school gives a class on Housman and is later saved from suicide when visited by the grateful ghosts of former pupils. Housman has also been saluted on the radio by the BBC’s hugely popular agricultural soap opera The Archers, which has been running since 1951 and is set in the fictional West Midlands county of Borsetshire. Bert Fry is a retired farm worker and part-time gardener who also fancies himself as a poet, and in an episode broadcast in January 2014, he asks one of his employers for some washing-up liquid: ‘“Loveliest of trees, the cherry now…” I’m going to clean the dirt and the algae off. I always thinks of Housman when I looks at it. In fact it’s sparked off a few lines of me own if you’d care to hear them.’ People, on the whole, would rather not hear Bert’s poetry, which is written in a style closer to that of William McGonagall than Housman; undaunted by this lack of enthusiasm, Bert has long been planning to publish a volume of his verses which he intends to call A Borsetshire Boy.

  One way of judging the continuing appeal of Housman among the young is to look at YouTube, where he has a surprisingly strong presence. If not currently on the British school curriculum, Housman’s poems are certainly being studied at schools in America and other parts of the world as far away from Shropshire as South Korea. Many of the videos posted on YouTube are class assignments in which students ‘interpret’ Housman’s poems, usually in the form of a recital of an individual poem, sometimes accompanied by a dramatic or animated presentation. Other YouTube postings seem to be unrelated to school work, or are at any rate persuasively extra-curricular: a young black man with dreadlocks recites ‘When I was one-and-twenty’ while standing in a back yard; a young Chinese-American, beneath his bedclothes, sings unaccompanied what appears to be his own rather beautiful setting of ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’; four students from the Universitas Slamet Riyadi in Java, two of them in hijabs, sing the words of ‘The Olive’ translated into their own language.

  The poems that appear most frequently on YouTube are ‘When I was one-and-twenty’, ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’ and ‘To an Athlete Dying Young’. The last of these is often used to commemorate classmates or sportsmen who have died prematurely – or, by stretching a point, celebrities such as the film actor Paul Walker, who was killed in a car crash at the age of forty. (The use of the poem in this way stretches back to 1949, when lines from it were printed beneath a New York Tribune editorial on the death of Jack Lovelock, the New Zealand Olympic runner who had died at the age of thirty-nine when he fell under a subway train.) Videos of ninth grade African-American New Media students reciting ‘When I was one-and-twenty’, dance interpretations of Housman’s poems being performed by pupils at the Buenlag National High School at Calasiao in the Philippines, and a supine Mumbai-based Indian poet reciting ‘Here dead we lie because we did not choose’ to illustrate his disgust with those who do not treat soldiers with proper respect, show just how far Housman’s poems have travelled, just how widely and variously they are appreciated, interpreted and employed. Even those who scoff at the lack of quality control on YouTube could hardly fail to be moved by a performance of ‘Look not in my eyes’ in American Sign Language or a man celebrating his 103rd birthday with a recitati
on from memory of ‘Think no more, lad; laugh, be jolly’.

  Come, Pipe a Tune to Dance to, Lad

  The Internet has also become one of the principal platforms for music, and music remains one of the main ways in which people first encounter Housman’s poetry, both in classical and contemporary settings. It seems only right that John France’s invaluable blog on British classical music is called ‘The Land of Lost Content’, but Housman is no longer the preserve of English pastoralists. He has nevertheless remained a point of reference in instrumental pieces written in the tradition of Butterworth and Julius Harrison, such as James Langley’s The Coloured Counties: Idyll for Orchestra from the 1960s and Edward Watson’s Blue Remembered Hills (1994) for flute, cor anglais and string trio. More importantly, Housman has also maintained a place in the continuing English song tradition. This tradition was in decline for many years after the Second World War, but interest in it is now fast growing thanks to societies devoted to individual composers, music festivals at which the songs are performed, and the availability on CD of previously neglected works.

  There are those who think, as Constant Lambert did back in 1934, that contemporary composers should now leave Housman alone, that his language and mood belongs to a specific period and that there are already so many good settings of his poems in the catalogue that no more are needed. One composer who disagreed was John R. Williamson (1929–2015), who achieved the distinction of having set more of Housman’s poems than any other composer. Three years before he died, he claimed to have set ‘all of Housman’s verse, excepting the long poems’, and while this may be something of an exaggeration, the LiederNet Archive lists 121 Housman settings by him, almost all of them for baritone and piano. Other composers have written settings more likely to remain in the repertoire. Some, such as Peter Pope and Ian Venables, have followed in the earlier lyric tradition of pre-war settings; others, such as Michael Berkeley, Ronald Corp and Martin Bussey, have attempted to forge a new musical style far removed from the nostalgic English pastoral mode. Venables argues that although his cycle of four Songs of Eternity and Sorrow (2004) consciously uses the same forces as Vaughan Williams and Gurney, what made the piece contemporary was his choice of such poems as ‘Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?’, which earlier composers had shunned because of its subject matter. This poem has also been given a rollicking setting by Stephen Hough as part of Other Love Songs (2009), a cycle intended to accompany Brahms’s two sets of Liebeslieder Walzer and explore different kinds of love than the romantic heterosexual variety celebrated by the older composer. An earlier setting of the poem (1994) by the Australian composer Gordon Kerry reached a wide audience when it was taken up by the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Choir, who featured it in concerts and recordings alongside Cilla Black’s ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’ and Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’.